Computer systems have become critical in today's society. Conventionally large computer systems, and more recently smaller systems, have utilized scheduling engines to schedule execution of computer processes. Scheduling of execution of computer processes is often referred to as job management. Job management may involve scheduling a computer process to occur at one designated time, repeatedly at periodic times, as well as according to other time schedules. Numerous scheduling engines exist today, three of which are available from Computer Associates under the names Unicenter CA-7, Unicenter CA-Scheduler, and Unicenter CA-Job track.
It is not uncommon for a given computer system to utilize more than one type of scheduling engine. This may occur, for example, through the merger of two different companies, and the resulting merger of their computer systems. Often, each different type of scheduling engine is designed to receive instructions to process scheduling requests, with those received instructions being in a particular format. The particular format may differ from the particular format utilized for other scheduling engines. The use of multiple scheduling engines that expect instructions in different formats causes difficulties because, conventionally, this has required each computer application that wishes to request scheduling of a computer process to have an interface for each scheduling engine.